Skills
Piloting Skillhttp://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/85179/what-triggers-crew-experience-increases Crew members who control the helm subsystem gains one point of experience for each incoming projectile that is dodged during combat. This includes asteroids, so long as you are in combat at the time. (Note that the dodges do not count while your ship is under the effects of +60% evasion from a cloak.) Remaining in an asteroid field and dodging asteroids after combat ends will not raise Piloting skill, but if your ship is equipped with a shield, draining and refilling the shield will raise Shield skill. This can be explicitly trained by finding an enemy that cannot break through your shields, and letting him fire at you. Increasing your dodge chance (i.e. more power to engines) will help this occur quicker, but even with the default chance you can max out the skill eventually. Engine Skill Exactly the same as piloting, Crew members manning the engines gain one point of XP for each projectile evaded while uncloaked in combat - and so it can be trained in the same way. Pilot and engine skill, if you have crew manning the systems together, will level up at the same time. Weapon Control Skill Crew members who man weapons control gain one point of experience for each weapon that is fired. It doesn't matter whether it hits or misses, or whether it can do damage (e.g. a beam weapon fired at a shield). Multi-shot weapons such as burst lasers still count as a single fire order and hence a single XP. This can be trained by firing non-lethal weapons (e.g. ones that do ion damage) repeatedly against a target that cannot damage you. Shield Skill Crew members manning the shields gains one point of experience every time the shield is hit during combat, not when they recharge. This prevents turning the shields on/off to level up. It doesn't matter what brings them down, be it direct enemy fire, ion damage or asteroids strikes. This can be trained by letting a target that cannot break through all of your shields repeatedly take one layer down. Repair Skill Crew members gain one point of experience for getting the "finishing blow" when repairing a subsystem. Note that hull breaches provide no repair experience. You can improve your repair skill in one of three ways. There's no perfect way to train this as it requires your systems to be damaged. One, you can focus the XP gains by always having the same crew member run around and repair everything after a battle. Two, you can permit boarders to run through your ship destroying systems, while sending your crew in afterwards to repair them after the boarders move on to another room. This is best done during an event that places boarders on your ship without the presence of an enemy ship, for obvious reasons. A third option is to bomb your own ship. If you decide to bomb your own ship, please be careful and read the next paragraph. Bombing your own ship can be a great way to raise repair skill if you have the resources and you are careful. You need lots missiles, and a good bomb launcher. You should also depower your engines and not have any Zoltans in the room. Otherwise, you will occasionally miss and use more missiles. This won’t be worthwhile unless you have a Breach Bomb Mark II or better yet, a Fire Bomb. The Breach Bomb Mark II does enough system damage (3 system damage) that this training process won’t take forever and you may still have a few missiles left. The math works out to this: 1 bomb=3 system damage=3 repair skill xp . You need 18 repair xp to gain one level. You need 36 xp (12 missiles) to level up one completely unskilled repair person, and 288 to level up 8 unskilled crew members. The Breach Bomb is really only useful to level up a couple of unskilled crew members or to finish the training of a near level upped character. The one upside to using a Breach Bomb Mark II is you can’t destroy your own ship, which is possible with a Fire Bomb. The Fire Bomb is the other option for bombing your own ship, but it is dangerous. Any system destroyed by fire means 1 point of hull damage. You can control the spread of the fire by opening/closing doors to rooms you want or don’t want on fire. A level 3 door control is also helpful. You should Fire Bomb your ship while at a store because you can repair your hull. You should do this late in the game when you have plenty of scrap and have bought most, if not all, the upgrades you want. It is, however, possible to avoid the hull damage if you stop the fire (directly fighting it, by venting with doors, or under a few extreme cases, using a bomb to either make a breach or destroy the system a system with a normal bomb does no hull damage), but the tradeoff is you will need to use more missiles. Either way, target your major systems (Engines, Shields, Weapons, and Drones). Unlike all normal systems, these systems can be over level 3, which means more repair experience. It is advisable to not let the fire harm your medbay, door control, and most importantly of all, your O2. You could very likely survive one of these systems being destroyed, but 2 or 3 would probably kill your crew (Your odds slightly improve if you have the Healing Bomb equipped and your weapon room was untouched). You can protect these systems and your crew by strategic venting of your ship. If fire does get to your crew or a key system, have a fire immune Rockman or a repair specialist already stationed in the room. A distant third choice would be a Crystal Being since they have extra health. The math for fire bombing your own ship depends on the ship you have. The two best ships are the Basilisk (Mantis Cruiser Layout B) and the Adjudicator (Zoltan Cruiser Layout A). Both of these ships have the major systems neatly grouped together with airlocks nearby, which means you need fewer missiles and suffer less hull damage. The worse ship would be the Shivan (Rock Cruiser Layout B). While the 4 Rockmen do help fighting fires, the ship doesn’t start with door control and it has no airlocks which makes normal venting impossible. You could still use a breach bomb but fire will still burn for awhile. As for the math, a single fire bombing of fully upgraded engines, shields, weapons, drones, and no other systems will net you 32 repair experience (each system at an 8x4) at the price of 1 missile and 4 points of hull damage. If your crew has no repair experience and full upgrades, it will cost exactly 9 missiles, 36 hull damage, and somewhere between 72-144 scrap for repairs (store repair prices vary between 2-4 scrap per a point of hull damage) to earn the 288 points of repair experience to level up your entire 8 man crew. If you decide to go for the 100, 200 or more experience, use multiple crew members to repair the damage. While this will spread the experience around, it will make the process go much faster. When a character is within 8 points of 36, pull him aside and have him repair one system by himself. Hand to Hand Combat Skill Crew members gain one point of experience for getting the finishing blow when fighting an enemy crew member or when giving the final point for one bar of damage to a system / subsystem. This generally gets trained in "real" situations. However, since XP is gained for taking out systems, a few extra XP can be gained from boarding if one tries to take out the enemy's systems before the crew. Complete Skills Tablehttp://ftlwiki.com/wiki/Races#Skills References: